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Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how leading a childhood characterized by transnational mobility affects youths’ understanding of and relationship to their ethnic identity.

Study approach: This study examines the effects of transnational mobility on ethnic identity by focusing on the specific case of Indian Americans who grew up in the USA and Bangalore, a city in southwest India, before relocating to the USA for college. The analysis for this chapter comes from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 transnational Indian American youth.

Findings: The data analysis reveals that by spending part of their childhood in India, transnational Indian American youth were able to learn more about their Indian ethnic identity, which helped them resolve issues related to their status as an ethnic minority in the USA, reframe how they define their ethnic identity, and reevaluate the status of their ethnic identity relative to their counterparts in the USA.

Originality: This study focuses on the unique case of Indian American youth who had a childhood characterized by transnational mobility. As such, this work contributes to the literature on children and youths’ transnational mobility through its focus on the migration patterns of relatively elite and socially privileged children and youth. Additionally, it adds to our understanding of the effects of migration between the USA and India by addressing how these processes affect children and youth. Last, it adds to the literature on Indian Americans by focusing on an understudied subpopulation within this group. The study motivates future research on the diversity that exists among transnationally mobile Indian American children and youth.

Purpose: Although the transnational mobility of youth is prevalent across the globe, the policies and strategies used by developing countries to promote youths’ transnational mobility remains unclear. This chapter aims to discuss a few emerging trends and concerns related to youth transnational mobility and human capital accumulation. It focuses on the specific case of youth transnational migration from India. As such, this chapter considers the factors that have led to the construction of aspirations for transnational migration among Indian youth.

Study approach: In this chapter, we examine youth transnational mobility by synthesising the major literature available in the area of globalisation and transnational migration in the developing countries context. The study also incorporates the policy debates and secondary data evidence in these domains to substantiate the arguments.

Findings: Mainly focussing on the internal state of affairs of India, this work highlights three critical issues (a) new norms and practices of human capital accumulation within India’s knowledge economy; (b) understanding state and formal-informal ‘commoditised’ market dynamics in the changing aspirations for global human capital formation, specifically through transnational migration; and (c) examining the upshots of youth transnational mobility in terms of the production of relatively new forms of caste and class inequalities within Indian society.

Originality: This conceptual piece of work is an initial foray to unpack the complexities of Indian youths’ migration for specialised forms of human capital accumulation in a global landscape. The study motivates future policy-oriented interdisciplinary research on education and transnational mobility, specifically in empirical research projects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a transnational immigrant youth’s engagement on social media supported her identity formation and allowed space to advance more just framing of Islam across school and online communities.

This qualitative study draws on data collected across two years, including interviews, classroom observations and social media posts. Using digital religion and counterstorying as a constructive theoretical frame, the authors asked: What was the role of social media in supporting a transnational immigrant youth’s critical media literacy practices within and beyond school. How, if at all, did these practices shift over time?

Findings highlight how I. Mohamud used social media in support of her identity development as a female, Muslim youth in a political climate antithetical to such liberation and how through an online community she engaged in counter stories to negative framing of Islam.

Our collaborative writing answers Lam and Warriner’s (2012) call for research exploring how individuals from migrant backgrounds interact with “diverse media representations and mobilize different interpretive frames for understanding societal events and personal experiences” (p. 207). Moreover, this study further answers El-Haj and Bonet (2012) call for research investigating “ways that youth inhabit particular identities in specific contexts and interactions and across time” (p. 41).

Using conceptions of transnationalism to (re)evaluate the field of comparative and international education (CIE), this chapter analyzes educational programming and policy for migrant refugee youth at the margins and borderlands of the nation-state system. Drawing from newspaper articles about displaced youth on Kenya’s eastern border and the southwestern U.S. border, this chapter focuses on comparative and international education’s potential influence on programming and policies in borderland regions. Both populations present the need for targeted educational programming within and outside of formal education systems and urgency for research linked with practice. We argue that CIE scholars can fill a critical, activist purpose to draw attention to educational access and curricular content in educational projects at the borders of the nation-state system, to investigate programming, and to work with practitioners and policy makers to address the needs of youth on the physical and figurative margins of education.

This article aims to describe methodological issues in relation to the definition of homelessness and the drawing of samples of young homeless people in four European countries. The purposes of the research project were, first, to make a comparison of different homeless situations facing young people in these four countries, and second, to introduce early intervention and action planning methodologies developed in the UK and The Netherlands to other countries in the study – Portugal (a family welfare society) and the Czech Republic (an ex‐communist regime redeveloping its welfare policies).

After extensive discussions and key worker interviews with local agencies, 54 homeless young people were interviewed in each country. Each sample was intended to be purposive in that it should recruit homeless young men and women from those born in that country from the dominant (white) ethnic group, born in that country from minority ethnic groups, and young people not born in that country. A major issue was how to define homelessness in order to be able to recruit across the spectrum of homeless youth.

The purposive samples recruited in the four countries reflected the availability of services in those countries and levels of family support. Whilst young homeless people in The Netherlands and the UK were mostly living in supported housing, in Portugal they were living as “hidden homeless” and in the Czech Republic on the streets or in squats.

The methodological difficulties encountered during the project are themselves a useful lesson learnt, for the creation of trans‐national understanding and politicy.

Nevertheless, despite the very different circumstances of limited services in Portugal and the Czech Republic, it appeared that both early intervention methods and key working approaches could be applied broadly across the EU.

Transnational studies of youth homelessness are rare and therefore produce particularly useful insights for research, policy and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to anticipate the potential outcomes of efforts to promote social inclusion of youth from refugee backgrounds by considering diverse research conducted on information and communication technologies (ICTs), social inclusion, and young people of refugee backgrounds. It is argued that, while social inclusion programs might be successful at the local level, it is unclear whether they might actually do more harm than good in other, transnational contexts.

Literature reporting on projects that use ICTs to facilitate social inclusion is critically examined, with specific attention to identifying the foundational assumptions underlying such projects. These foundational assumptions are considered in relation to findings of research that identifies the transnational character of the experiences, expectations and aspirations of young people of refugee backgrounds.

The analysis highlights a conceptual disjuncture between the local aims of social inclusion and the transnational experiences of youth with refugee backgrounds. This conceptual disjuncture raises important questions about the potential effects of any program that aims to use ICTs to support young people from refugee backgrounds. While it is clear that a number of potentially positive outcomes are likely from using ICTs to promote social inclusion for refugee youth, several potentially negative outcomes are also apparent. It is argued that these potential harms tend to be overlooked because the foundational concepts of social inclusion assume a “local” community. One means of avoiding the potential for such harms could be to adequately recognise the extent to which individuals and groups participate in intersecting local and transnational communities, networks and flows of ideas, resources, and people.

This paper uses evidence of the significance of transnational social and cultural fields to propose an important intervention in social inclusion programs, by pointing to the possible harms that might result from the success of programs that facilitate social inclusion at a local level without appropriate awareness of its effects on non‐local contexts in which participants might also be active.